with this mindset the future looks dim

[Garlyle]

Let me adjust that "It's common nowadays, MMO or elsewhere, to watch videos".....When MMOs were new, and before the dreaded WoW....NOBODY looked at videos, read write ups...EVER.

Sorry, but while the rise of YouTube and hyper-comprehensive wikis is relatively recent in MMO history, there have always been sites to go digging for information, and people have used them constantly.

And maybe I was just playing the wrong ones, but most of the older MMOs I've been through, the reality was that if you could handle one piece of content you could handle them all, short of being underlevelled/wrongly geared. The entirity of the 'skill' was just knowing how to play your class and which elemental weakness you should be exploiting, because past that, challenges weren't nearly as significantly differentiated from one another as they are in modern MMOs.